CFP - Queertopia! 5.0: Sexing the Law: Love as/at the Limit

May 25‐27, 2012,
Northwestern University School of Law and other venues

"You can’t make love to a unicorn."
‐Jean Genet

"The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything."
‐Carl Schmitt

Keynote: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of novels So Many Ways to Sleep Badly and Pulling Taffy, editor of anthologies Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, among others. Sycamore is also a critic, filmmaker, public installation artist, in short, a trouble‐maker.

Northwestern University’s Queer Pride Graduate Student Association and The Graduate School invite individual papers, complete panels and organized roundtables and workshops for its 5th annual academic festival, which includes our evening showcase, Queergasm! An Interdisciplinary Performance Event at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery. This year, Queertopia! is supported by Gender Studies, Performance Studies, Philosophy, Art History, Art Theory and Practice, French and Italian, Comparative Literary Studies, Sociology, the Radio, Television, Video, and
Film and Screen Cultures programs, the LGBTQA Resource Center, and The Sexualities Project at Northwestern.

Scholars, artists and activists from all disciplines are warmly welcome, including but not limited to philosophy, law and justice studies, sociology, anthropology, medical studies, psychology, psychiatry, biology, chemistry, mathematics, communications studies, technology studies, physics, art (and other) practice, art (and other) history, literature, political and critical theory, political science, music practice, musicology, moving image studies, performance studies, library
and archival studies and practice, religious studies, theology, and women’s, gender, queer, trans and sexuality studies.

This year’s theme invites scholars, artists and activists from all disciplines to fuck the law; that is, to explore the violent / erotic tension between sexuality and “law” in the broadest sense possible. Interpret “law” as juridical line, principle, system, boundary, limit, totality, rule, norm, more, threshold, the possible. Interpret “fuck” as to create, to make love (to), to caress, to make
come, to scandalize, to say “yes” to, to say “no” to, to subvert, to protest, to transform; to prove, to imagine and to embody that things could be otherwise.

As always, Queertopia! invites proposals that fall outside the strict realm of our theme. We love our academically and otherwise diverse community and we want you all back this year for our biggest queer and trans studies event yet!

Please send abstracts of 250 words, and a 100 word presentation summary / 75 word bio (for our conference booklet) to QPGSA at nuqpgsa@gmail.com by February 28th, 2012.